


Sumptuary Laws

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 13:23:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4139181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In odder moments, Natasha finds her thoughts turning to those frequently-ripped shirts of his; what a hassle it must be, replacing them all the time, although the concept of personal cost is nothing new to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sumptuary Laws

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired to write this by a silly conversation that took place while re-watching "The Avengers" with some of my students. I think I managed to keep the mood light almost all the way through, although there’s a hard kick of angst at the end. I hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading!

…

As a man who outgrows his clothing on a regular and unusually literal basis, Bruce owns a lot of shirts.

This is, by Natasha’s estimation, the only bone of materialism in his entire body. His private living quarters are otherwise kept with the severe, withholding economy of an army barracks, or maybe a monk’s cell, no doubt a habit he acquired during those five years spent dodging one global intelligence agency or another. It makes his presence in Stark Tower seem somehow precarious, as though everything could be fitted into a single suitcase and gone within an hour.

It probably could.

(There’s a bit more chaos to be found inside his office, though, more of the wild energy that takes hold of him in the midst of a project – but that’s a reflection of his thought process, which reminds her of watching electrical filaments snap and leap and connect inside a glass plasma globe.)

To head off a potential misunderstanding, it should be stressed that Natasha does not come by this odd sartorial knowledge while looking through his bureau drawers, or picking over his clean laundry as it waits in the dryer. She simply happens to be the one responsible for bringing him his clothes, after he’s changed back to the size he’s supposed to be.

“You know, we should really start designing you a suit,” Natasha tells him, once. “Or we could all put in for matching spandex uniforms, instead. That might be fun.”

“And what would those look like?” Bruce asks. She hears him hopping through the dried leaves to get a shoe on his foot. “We’d probably go around about the designs for so long that they’d end up just being six shirts that all read  _‘I’m with stupid’_  on the front.”

“But isn’t that the statement matching uniforms send anyway? Collective and collaborative idiocy?”

Bruce always dresses with a fumbling hurry as Natasha waits there: tugging his neckline, rolling his sleeves up or down, missing the right hole on his belt when he buckles it. Part of this may have to do with the steadiness of his hands, which does not return until about five minutes after he does. She has taken to turning her back until he’s finished, and so she doesn’t know whether he smiles at this comment or not.  

He does give a bark of dry laughter, but Natasha understands that this is not quite the same.

“In that case,” Bruce says, “we’d be better off with five shirts that said, ‘ _If found, please return to Natasha.’_ ”

“Oh yeah? Then what would mine say?”

“’ _I am Natasha,_ ’ probably.”

(And he doesn’t get to see her smile, either. Which is just as well.)

But anyway, his shirts. His shirts surprise her.

Not the styles, of course. The styles are invariably of the collared or pullover variety. The number itself is, as mentioned, perfectly explicable, given his constant state of propinquity to shirt-ruining disaster – that’s another learned habit, there. He likely buys them in plastic packs of three.

What surprise Natasha are the colors.

Many are bold, bright. There are yellows and blues and greens, an occasional red that catches the light like a flapping cape. The plaid and flannel ones are often a surprising harmony of things that ought to clash but do not.

(Perhaps this eye for color shouldn’t surprise her – his professional expertise is in dealing with particulars, with seeing both the whole and the sum of its disparate parts at the same time.)

And there is purple, several different shades of it, flowering clover and martin feathers and banded amethyst, a color she would’ve never guessed to be his favorite. Purple is luxurious, historically forbidden to all but royalty by custom and cost alike; the dye was first made, according to lore, from a species of rock snail found in one region of the Mediterranean. As many as nine thousand had been required to make a single gram of pigment, so that items dyed purple were often worth their weight in gold.

But it also strikes her as a color of self-government, of taciturn and imperial dignity. It is the final, most powerful visible wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum, after which come ultraviolet rays and x-rays and gamma rays.

Maybe that’s why he likes it.

(The color’s other possible connotation strikes her later – that of Purple Heart medals, hung on the breastcoats of wounded soldiers, or else awarded posthumously to dead ones for the good service rendered to their country.)

None of the shirts are new, however, talks about luxury aside. Some even have stitches in them, rips and tears he’s mended with fastidious attention. Natasha can only spot these from up close, which is also how she knows that they smell like fabric softener and bay rum aftershave.

(Not that she claims any familiarity with that.) 

Every now and then, Natasha will catch herself studying how the shirts hang off his back, travel down his sides. Bruce stands, she has noticed, with his body in a slightly parenthetical curve, as though there is a weight tied to his neck; but his walk has a well-balanced, upright carriage to it, a discreet awareness of the space around him that reminds her of someone making his way between narrow shelves full of fragile objects.

And sometimes he catches her staring, too, because that kind of sixth sense is yet another learned habit of his. 

(In fact, this is usually what saves her. He is so wary of being evaluated or assessed or watched for the slightest change – for the Other Guy, rather than for himself – that other motivations are not even considered.)

“…What is it?” He bends an elbow to pat himself over the shoulder. “Nobody stuck a  _‘Kick Me’_  sign back there, did they?”

Natasha lifts her head.

She sits on a stool in the lab, chin propped up in one hand as she translates end-user certificates seized during a weapons transfer they intercepted in Serbia two days ago. Everything is written in Albanian, which at least tells her that the at-large parties are based either in the Preševo Valley or Kosovo. She’s trying to figure out which.

Bruce stands before a holographic display, adjusting numbers with a deft tap of his fingers – precision measurements of parity-violation in electron scattering tests, used for studying the atomic nucleus. Someone at Culver University had written him asking for research feedback. He’s explained that electron scattering is rather like throwing a bunch of tennis balls at a wall you can’t see, and determining its size by which balls come back to smack you in the face.

( _“No,”_ he’d told her immediately, to forestall the joke already forming on her lips.  _“Don’t you dare.”_ )

“Oh,” Natasha says, and snatches up the nearest lie. “Nope, just a piece of lint.”

He drops his hands. “That’d be a good story for the workplace safety handbook, though.”

“Yeah, right under why the break room toaster has to be hooked up to a surge protector at all times.” She walks over. “Hold still.”

Bruce does.

She pinches the fabric gently between her fingers. His back at this close distance gives off warmth like an idling engine, like a wood-burning stove.

And in a single, careless, unthinking glance, Natasha feels her gaze swoop from the nape of his neck down to where the shirt tucks tidily in below his belt – there is a moment where her toes curl up inside her shoes, where a line of glowing energy seems to snap through her and travel out into her fingers as they brush against him.

But she looks harder at the shirt itself – purple again, a shade so deep it is almost black, and a color indicative in any context of great, terrible personal costs paid  – and affects the act of tossing something onto the floor.

“There.” She steps away, although not as quickly as she’d planned. “Perfect.”

“Ah.” Bruce turns towards her, arms gathered against his sides with the hands clasped together in that same china-shop etiquette as usual. He smiles, fleetingly, but at least it’s something. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Now, remind me again, what would my shirt say? I’m in charge, right?” She smiles then, too, so that he can see it. “I said,  _perfect._ ”

“Well. Thanks.”

They both return to their work. 

If he notices the fact that she still keeps looking at his back, during odd, stolen intervals, he does not say anything. 

…

And when Bruce disappears, he takes nothing with him – or at least nothing that can be carried in the conventional sense.  

So Natasha finds herself at liberty to look through his bureau drawers anyway: to select a shirt that still feels warm under her fingers, and pull it in around her shoulders, and to press its fabric against her nose and mouth as she breathes. She especially likes wearing the brightly-colored ones, the yellows and blues and greens and purples. 

He has left her plenty to choose from, after all.  

…


End file.
